Dinu Luca (University of
Bucharest)

"Knack Stories"
Revisited

How do we carve the Zhuangzi into sense? How
do we confront, as readers, this astonishing sequence of
parables, stories, narratives, descriptions, dialogues and
glosses that continuously intertwine, intersect and echo each
other in the space of its 33 chapters? How do we go beyond all
the contradictions, obstacles, obscurities, paradoxes, ironies,
and allusions that populate this text, and truly join Zhuangzi,
whoever that may be, in his free and easy wandering?

The answers to these questions are indeed multiple,
and the differences between them are particularly subtle:
Zhuangzi's skepticism, his relativism, perspectivism,
contextualism and anti-foundationalism, as well as his
naturalism, mysticism, primitivism, antirationalism,
aestheticism, idealism, monism or romanticism, all of them in
various shapes and sizes, have been offered as as many solutions.
His most competent readers have closely and carefully explored
the major articulations of the text, its dominant features, its
nodal points, those lines of force that build up its very fabric
of ideas and, after all, its very essence, re-reading, redefining
and reformulating them into one coherent theory or another.

One may have noticed that even though some of the
answers above may look as distant from each other as Chu from
Yue, they are yet, in another sense, as close as gall and
bladder: they are, each and everyone, an -ism. Each of them
starts from one predetermined picture of coherence and goes on to
patiently identify it and sometimes even build it in the
interstices, empty spaces and crevices of the text. In
anticipation of any possible objections, the Zhuangzi is
from the very beginning unequivocally reduced to its first seven
chapters. These are considered, as it is well-known, to be the
closest to Zhuangzi himself and therefore more entitled than the
rest of the text to constitute a solid basis for the theoretical
developments soon to follow. They are also believed, after all,
to be outside the quick sand status of the outer and
miscellaneous chapters, which come from many sources and whose
textual fluidity may thus prove dangerous even to experienced
readers. When all precautions have been taken and all footnotes
have prominently exposed the self-imposed textual limits,
interpretation may safely and triumphantly proceed. And indeed,
so it does, as analytically as possible, removing in the process
many of the webbed toes and extra fingers of the fragments that
do not fold along the linearity of the major -ism in
question.

Accordingly, one forgets the use of uselessness and
that the useless is actually useful. One also forgets that he
whose hand has an extra finger would scream if he were to remove
it and that seabirds, even when receiving kingly honors, die
because of unsuitable treatment. Spitting images of the Duke of
Lu, we tend to treat the text ritually and carve it according to
all rules of ceremony; still, it seems that most often we do not
know how to use the light.

And this happens in spite of the fact that Zhuangzi
told us, I believe, how to read him, how to undo and carve into
explication his own text or, for that matter, any text. All we
need to do is make the effort to accept that, all in all, a text
is an ox, just as any explication is, as the etymology of the
word jie shows, just a carving up, a dissection, an undoing.[1]

Let us, then, reread the well-known Butcher Ding
story and see what Zhuangzi had to say about undoing oxen and,
indirectly, undoing texts:

Butcher Ding was carving an ox
for Prince Wen Hui.

Whenever his hand
touched,

whenever his shoulder
leaned,

whenever his foot
stepped,

whenever his knee
propped,

zip! zip! whoosh!
whoosh!

as he advanced his knife, zap!
zap!:

nothing was out of tune, concurring with the
"Mulberry Grove" dance and according with the
"Managing Chief" rhythm.[2]

To carve an ox means, it seems, to operate
rhythmically. This, in turn, means activating all your limbs,
concurring in rhythm and rhyme and harmonizing with onomatopoeic
sequences, zipping, whooshing, and zapping, so that fine ears
tune in to the subtle noises of skin falling from flesh and flesh
rolling from bones and attentive eyes perceive the
all-encompassing syntax of your movements, which are as swift and
coordinated as the verbs that create it. To carve an ox is, then,
a matter of order, correspondences, and echoes, a matter of
dynamics that is perfectly unified in its variety. Dynamics, to
put it otherwise, in which all things respond to each other
canonically, in the highly ritual canon of the "Mulberry
Grove," a dance that comes, as tradition would have it, from
the times of Tang the Victor, or the "Managing Chief,"
a piece that has been passed on from the olden days of Yao.[3]

Confronted with this polyphony, it is no wonder
that the educated watcher that the Prince shows himself to be has
the immediate awareness of the profound aesthetic act that he is
witnessing and, sighing with admiration, he questions the
butcher:

"O! Wonderful!" said Prince Wen Hui.
"How is it that your technique reached such a
point?"

In spite of the canonical character of the music
pieces, the Prince is no Ji Zha and cannot interpret coherently
and ritually every new theme in the performance he has just
witnessed; moreover, his understanding seems doomed to remain
exclamatory, as he is overwhelmed by the whole performance and
cannot perceive patterned sequence behind simultaneous actions.
Or maybe the Prince has this ability, but can only express it in
exclamations: he is not, after all, a master of the fine points
of language, as his inappropriate questions to Mencius clearly
show. And just as the Confucian philosopher taught King Hui of
Liang to speak of human-heartedness and righteousness, the Daoist
cook is now teaching Prince Wen Hui (one and the same person as
the King above) to speak about the Dao. As such, apart from being
a lesson about how to read and interpret things, the
butcher's lesson will also touch on the thorny issue of
speaking the Dao, the well-known Dao that cannot be spoken of;
the lesson here joins, thus, the long series of paradoxes
centered on the inability of speaking that haunt this text, just
as they hunt many other Daoist texts. Let us read it:

Butcher Ding put down his knife and answered:
"What your servant loves is the Dao, which goes beyond
technique. When your servant began to carve oxen, what he saw was
nothing but oxen. After three years, he saw no whole ox any more.
Today, however, your servant meets the ox with his spirit and
does not watch it with his eyes, as his senses know where to stop
and his spirit desires to advance."[4]

The ways, the methods, the daos, maybe the Dao
itself, can be followed, told of, untold of, practiced, trod on,
floated on, wandered on, and so on: they can also be loved, and
it is this act of love that brings the butcher his musicality.
His harmonic capacity, the one that has impressed the Prince, is
beyond technique and close to the Dao. Incidentally, this does
not imply that human technique and the Dao are fundamentally
separated: the two terms are both part of an uninterrupted and
infinite series, like rings on the chain that link all things
with all that are beyond things. Proof of that comes from chapter
12, that connects in a sequence the Dao, the De, administration,
and skill:

That which pervades Heaven and earth is the Dao;
that which moves through the ten thousand things is the Power;
that whereby superiors govern the people is state affairs; that
which gives art to ability is technique. Technique is linked to
state affairs, state affairs are linked to righteousness,
righteousness is linked to the Power, the Power is linked to the
Dao and the Dao is linked to Heaven.[5]

Let us go back to the butcher's love story. The
history of this love-story, a story 19 years in length, as we
will soon discover, is a history of carving, cutting, undoing,
and explicating. The butcher "ex-plicates" the ox, he
unfolds it and deploys it along its connecting lines, unveiling
its details, exposing its articulations, undoing its joints. And
explication is certainly not just simple penetration tong
or a reaching da into the interior of things, both of
which may result in self-illumination ming, but rather a
form of release: the butcher will release the ox's texture in
the same way the transformation of things will release Lao Dan or
Master Yu from life's fetters and in the same way Cloud
General is advised to set his heart-mind free, probably from the
burden of its own confusion or bad inclinations, if not from
under the ice that prevents all of us from becoming "perfect
men" - as Laozi explicates to Nanrong Chu.[6]

It is this kind of explicatory release, revealing
the pleats and folds of the ox's texture, which gives sense
to the butcher's activity. His carving will be, of course,
quite clumsy at the beginning, his major mistake being that he
can see only the whole: not the whole as a sum total of its parts
or as the meeting place of all inner and outer individual
characteristics, but rather the overwhelming whole, the
"whole" whole. It takes three years for the ox not to
be this overwhelming and frightening whole, this flux of
outerness, which is rich, and detailed, and intricate, and which
may well have blinded his eyes and deafened his ears. What is it
that truly happened during these three years? How much carving
practice did he accumulate? How much mastering of exuberant
oxness, how much sitting and forgetting, how much fasting of the
heart? We do not know. We do know, however, that now his senses
finally know where to stop and do not let themselves be lured any
more by the deceiving extravaganza of colors and textures: his
"ministers", as the butcher calls his sense organs,
assume the proper ritual position and stay behind his spirit,
"the daemonic in him", in Graham's words, which
ventures to explore the ox while possessed by a strange desire to
advance. It is the spirit that "runs into" the ox,
almost by accident if we are to read the direct sense of the
verb,[7] in the process of
inner wandering: the text-ox is no longer outside, a blinding
object for a blind analysis, but inside, something you stumble
across in your free and easy wandering.

Every ox (and every text), it would seem, is
somewhere inside of you, and every (explicatory) carving would
seem to be some sort of self-explaining. [8] But this does not mean that deconstruction is a
random process, a game without rules and direction. Here is what
the butcher has to say about this:

Relying on the natural structure of the ox, I
strike the great interstices and guide my knife through the great
cavities, following the way they are. Not even ligaments,
tendons, gristles and cartilages do I attempt to cut; how much
less in the case of big bones! A good butcher changes his knife
every year, because he cuts; an ordinary butcher changes his
knife once a month because he hacks; your servant has had this
knife for nineteen years and carved a few thousand oxen with it,
but its blade is as if it had been freshly sharpened on the
grindstone.

There exists, therefore, as Chinese commentators
like to say,[9] "a
methodless method," which would seem to consist in relying
on the natural structures, the "heavenly structuring lines
li," as the text calls them: the outcome of this method is
that one becomes capable of going along with the way things are
and mold oneself to the actual unique makeup of the ox-text that
is to be carved. This incessant adjustment to facts, this
flexible adaptation to any momentary configuration appears to
govern the laws of reading as well as the laws of all
efficiency.[10]

A question has been lurking for a while in the
background, waiting for its turn to be asked: how exactly does
the analogy I have built operate, if at all, in terms of the
instruments? To put it otherwise, if a knife is that by which one
carves an ox, what is that by which one carves a text?

The answer is hard to find and Zhuangzi is in no
hurry to provide it. He tells us about, or rather further
confuses us with, the strange way a skilled carver uses his
carving instrument: the butcher strikes empty spaces, guides his
knife through the void, doing nothing that one is supposed to do
with a knife: he does not cut, he does not hack, he acts without
acting and it seems that the ox unfolds by itself in front of his
blade. Under these circumstances, it is no wonder that the text
tells us that what the butcher carves with is actually a
non-knife:

Between the joints there are interstices, and
the blade of the knife has no thickness: when you have something
that has no thickness enter something that has interstices, there
is space, there is space; as for roaming with the knife, there
certainly is lots of extra room. That is why your servant has had
this knife for nineteen years and carved a few thousand oxen with
it, but its blade is as if it had been freshly sharpened on the
grindstone.

"Extremely thin" is the basic way in
which commentators read the butcher's words about the blade
that is devoid of thickness.[11] But we know very well, just as the
commentators or Zhuangzi himself do, that there are no things
devoid of thickness and that what creeps and freely wanders in
the empty places of the ox's joints must be something else.
Something else that is, of course, much harder to grasp and much
harder to circumscribe and which, strangely enough, is the very
thing that warrants the superposition between an ox and a text
which I have been suggesting. This something is figure. Figure is
that which has made possible the analogy until now and figure is
that which has allowed us to read the whole anecdote as a
mise-en-abîme for the whole text of the Zhuangzi, as a key to its
undoing. Again, it is figure once more that we have to appeal to
now: as our eyes cannot see the thickness-less knife, our spirit
has to see it as a non-knife, a figure that disguises something
else, maybe spirit itself roaming freely or maybe
non-discriminating intellect. This, incidentally, could be a
possible answer to the question above.

But I do not think that unveiling the figure,
undoing it and unfolding it and approximating it, as the
commentators quoted above tried to do, is what matters most here;
instead, it seems wiser to plainly recognize it as figure and
accept its figurative role. Once we have admitted that figures,
in all guises and shapes, are the basic stuff on which we can
tentatively build our reading, than we can backtrack and see how
the butcher may be a figure for any interpreter, how carving the
ox may be a figure for the way in which we should read a text and
also maybe discern why the text is made up of this complex
sequence of anecdotes, dialogues, narratives, and explanations -
figures upon figures upon figures that attempt to say to us what
cannot be said.[12] And
should we need any further incentive to read figuratively and do
a multi-layered carving of the text, let us remember that,
according to his interpreter in chapter 33, Zhuangzi himself was,
as we have seen, very good at "responding to change and
explicating/undoing things."

And now, for a proper ending, another figure:

However, whenever I reach a cluster, I see where
it will be difficult to act, and because of this I cautiously
stay on guard, my vision stops and my movements slow. I move the
knife very gently and swish!, it's been carved, like clumps
of earth piling up on the ground. I then stand holding the knife,
look all around me in the four corners, satisfied, proud and with
my intent fulfilled. I then take care of the knife and hide it
away.

It seems that, as usual, Zhuangzi is playing games
with us. Did he not tell us that the butcher saw nothing with the
eyes and that his senses stopped? Did he not suggest that his
movement was rather a movement of the spirit? Whence
cautiousness, whence intent realized? And who is it that we are
talking about now, anyway? Is the assertive wu here the
same as the deferential chen from above?[13] Why bring Ding back to the world of
sensation, emotion, and intent? What motivates this deviation
from the image of hermeneutic perfection of the ox carver?

One possible solution, suggested by Robert Eno (in
Kjellberg and Ivanhoe, 1996, 135-6), would be to read the passage
in light of the beginning of the Butcher Ding story, where we
witness his music-like performance in front of the Prince. We can
easily imagine that a more difficult score than the usual one may
interrupt the flux of automatic movements of the butcher and
force him to refocus on conscious execution or even to undergo,
again, some strenuous practice. Still, it is quite puzzling that
the degree of efficiency of this second performance, of this
carving with the senses, is not at all different from the first
one, in which carving was entrusted to the spirit.

Maybe the answer lies somewhere else. Maybe
Zhuangzi wants to tell us that what we have been reading so far
is a figure and that this figure, like all figures, has to be
abandoned, like all fish-traps and rabbit-snares: we have to go
beyond figure if we are to understand whatever that figure wants
to tell us, just as we have to go beyond all the metaphysics of
the Dao if we want to see it in ants, panic grass and the like.
To put it otherwise, only exposing the figure qua figure may
reveal the figure's figurativity and make us wonder about its
meaning. Zhuangzi does not miss the opportunity to do exactly
that, undoing everything he has done and bringing the butcher
full-circle back among us, making him one of us. And after his
knife has proved to be a non-knife, here it is again, just a
knife, but a hidden one, one removed from sight - from the same
sight which at first saw, than saw no more, and now sees again.
It is in these empty figurative spaces, these rifts, fissures,
and paradoxes that the butcher's intent is realized and, I
think, Zhuangzi's intent as well. We do not know now much
more about the butcher's change of status, but maybe we do
not want to ask the question any more.

However, a question may still be worth asking: what
is, after all, this undoing? What does the performing of the
textual score mean? Prince Wen Hui, who reads in his turn the
figure, may provide the answer:

It is not difficult to see what the Prince has
learned from the story. All we have to do is read this story in
connection to the previous passage in the Zhuangzi, which it is
said to illustrate. Let us review the context.

Our life has boundaries, but knowledge has none.
To pursue something that has no boundaries with something that
has boundaries is dangerous; this being so, to still go after
knowledge is indeed dangerous.

If you do good, stay away from fame,

If you do bad, stay away from punishment,

Make a principle out of following the
middle.

You'll be able to preserve life.

You'll be able to preserve integrity.

You'll be able to take care of your
parents.

You'll be able to complete your allotted
span.

The Prince, it seems, reads the butcher's
adjusting to all situations as an instance of the principle of
constancy and keeping the middle that enables one to live a long
life. But are we sure that this is what he reads in the story?
Can we know for a fact that he reads what the butcher has to say
in the same way as we do?

We are not the Prince, so we do not know why the
Prince has read the story the way he has. On the other hand, from
here above the River Hao, where we imagine ourselves to be, his
reading looks appropriate.[14] But it seems to me that more significant than
what he reads is that he reads something. The
Prince does not let the story go, he interprets it, he undoes the
butcher's story along its articulations, meanings and
structuring lines, li: he makes it signify by
contextualizing it, explaining it, and relating it to something
else, in this case the abstract way of nourishing life. By his
very act of interpretation, the Prince teaches us the same lesson
that the butcher has taught him: that undoing is adjusting,
responding each time as the situation requires it, echoing in the
concert of correlative connections. And also that, indeed, a
story is, after all, an ox.

For someone who needed so many interviews with
Mencius, the Prince proved to be a quick and skilled practitioner
of hermeneutics. Maybe we should attempt to emulate him too, and
to this end I will now follow, after the thread of undoing, the
thread of doing, as it is woven in Wheelwright Bian's story.
In the end I will try to highlight once more the way in which, I
believe, these stories should function as figures for the way in
which the Zhuangzi itself should be read and
rewritten.

Just like Butcher Ding's, Wheelwright
Bian's story looks somewhat different from the other
"knack stories." If the butcher's story carves
itself out of the group by the almost mystical skill reached by
the butcher[15] or by his
unmatched playfulness,[16]
the wheelwright's figure stands out mainly because of its
ability to become a figure: from all the anecdotes in the
Zhuangzi, this seems to be the most often quoted, paraphrased
and alluded to story in the medieval texts of literary
criticism.[17] Let us read
it, too, step by step, hoping that by undoing it we shall be able
to find a story about doing:

Duke Huan was reading a book in his hall while
Wheelwright Bian was chiseling a wheel in front of the hall.
Putting down his mallet and chisel, the wheelwright went up and
asked the Duke: "I venture to ask what kind of words are
these that you are reading." "These are the words of
the Sages." "Are these Sages still alive?"
"They are dead." "Then what my master is reading
is but the dregs and dross of the ancients." "I was
reading a book," said the Duke, "why should the
wheelwright comment on it? If you have something by way of
explanation, all right; if not, you shall die."[18]

The anecdote starts more abruptly than Butcher
Ding's story and seems to proceed at a faster pace. I do not
think that the one to impose this rhythm is the Duke, even though
the hesitant, sometimes cowardly, personality of Duke Huan of Qi,
did prompt him on more than one occasion to take rash and
impulsive action;[19] it is
rather the wheelwright who sets the pace, as he abandons work and
does the unthinkable, i.e. he goes up and adopts the dialogic
position, the position of discursive equality with the duke.
Through this act, the structural rules of the anecdote, as they
are sublimated in the sum total of formulas and conventions that
govern the inferior-superior confrontations in traditional
discourse, are blatantly violated. As such, Zhuangzi can be said
to signal out that his story will not be part of this tradition,
that it will not confirm it, but rather attack it, infirm it,
subject it to endless irony.

That this is indeed the case is further
demonstrated by the positioning of the story immediately after a
discourse on the futility of language and writing. Thus, the
anecdote becomes a perfect illustration of this very futility:
the distrust in the power of discourse almost forces the anecdote
into being, it almost calls for little fables that can exist by
themselves, cut off from any context, and are far better
qualified to sneak in like a knife or spin like a wheel, thereby
avoiding the meandering of a linguistic discourse about the
inadequacy of anything linguistic.

Going back to the story, let us notice that by
going up into the hall, perpetrating the aggressive interruption
of his superior's action and then submitting the Duke's
reading to blunt and undisguised evaluation, the wheelwright
violates a multitude of rules. Before taking a closer look at
these violations, let us review the scene as it looks at the
beginning: in the upper position, the superior, reading; in the
lower position, the inferior, chiseling. Their actual actions
seem to echo their positions, and the opposition that is created
between them seems maximal: the opposition between reading and
chiseling is the opposition between the interpretive undoing
attempted by the Duke and the creative doing of the wheelwright.
But his doing is chiseling, and chiseling is, come to think of
it, also undoing, the taking away of extra material from the
uncarved block. As such, the opposition can hardly be called
maximal, and it is maybe this awareness that prompts the
wheelwright to transgress the rule.

In any case, by climbing up into the ritual space
of the hall, the wheelwright marks from the very beginning his
distance from Butcher Ding. The butcher was just the subject of
some musical curiosity on the part of his master, his right to a
discursive posture being conferred to him, not demanded by him;
the wheelwright, on the other hand, imposes himself, by his very
move upwards, as an equal partner of dialogue for Duke Huan. In
other words, Bian sets himself as an independent discursive
subject. That is why his words cannot be an explication, an
undoing of some teaching, as the butcher's turned out to be,
or a disquisition of some sort, as the Duke seems to expect; his
will be prescriptive words, words that will continuously build in
the background a performative rhetoric, an institutional
alternative to the misbehaving of his reading master. By going up
into the hall, the wheelwright assumes the ministerial position,
setting himself up as an institution and performing the normal
function of such a unit: chastising, remonstrating, and advising.
The Duke himself understands very well that he is in for some
prescription or another, and that action, not commentary or
interpretation is requested from him: accordingly, he himself
states the two possible courses of action that his confrontation
with Bian may lead to (the wheelwright's death or survival),
while refraining from any interpretation, now or later. This is
everything he has to say, and he will not be coming back at the
end of the anecdote with any figure reading of the kind performed
by Prince Wen Hui.

We should pause for a while and cast a glance at
the dialogue. By this point in the text, the Duke's
questioning has already been done, and it has been done in an
ordinate fashion: the wheelwright asked about the kind of words
Duke Huan was reading and obtained a response bearing not on
their kind, but on their origin. The Duke shows thus himself to
be an obviously poor reader, one who steers his course by
appealing to prestige and authority as arguments and for whom
origin prevails over meaning, form, or direction. Consequently,
the second question of the wheelwright will have to gauge the
performative efficacy of these words: if the Sages were alive,
their utterances, closely connected to the prestige of their
authors, might somehow acquire some perlocutionary effect,
produce some change in reality.[20] When the answer is once again inappropriate,
the wheelwright knows enough to feel enabled to express his
judgment: the words that Duke Huan was reading are but the dregs
and the dross, the ungraceful remains and the dead substance of a
once living (and efficient) logos. This denial of the value of
the logos when separated from its speaker[21] brings to memory not only the unwanted
hypomnesic effects referred to by King Thamus in his rejection of
the gift of writing, but also the whole logocentric tradition in
which Derrida finds his centerless center. However, let us defer
comparison for another time, because the wheelwright differs and
seems to want to chisel a slightly different story.

Before reviewing it, we should perhaps go back to
the courses of action opened by Duke Huan as a reaction to the
wheelwright's transgression and highlight there what needs
highlighting: the wheelwright, the doer, is required to prove his
undoing ability or die. He has to explain himself, to undo his
judgment by means of living words in order to avoid death. The
equation here, which is so different from the butcher's
formula of nourishing life, connects in an disquieting way doing,
undoing, life and death,[22]
and the already anticipated end of the story, when the Duke will
not interpret, but act, strengthens this inquietude: has Bian
escaped death? Or has he failed in his persuasion?

We do not know. Let us read on, and maybe we will
find out that life and death are but a pair like any other in our
never-ending series of binary linguistic constructs by means of
which we busy ourselves passing exclusive judgments over the
world. Also, maybe we will discover that both doing and undoing
are but carving and chiseling. Finally, maybe we will be able to
see that all we need to do (should we learn how to) is solve the
ubiquitous language problem, jie it and jie
ourselves from it. Then the equation above, like all others, will
melt into meaninglessness in the center of the circle of things
where the axis of the Dao is located. So let us proceed:

"Your servant contemplates this by means of
his thing" said Wheelwright Bian. When I chisel the
wheel,

if I'm slow, work's sweet, but the
wheel's not solid,

if I'm swift, work's bitter, but the
wheel won't get in.

Neither quick, nor slow - this is something you
find with your hand and respond to with your heart: your mouth
cannot voice this, yet there is a knack there to it. Your servant
could not expose it to his son, and his son could not receive it
from him. That is why, I've gone along for seventy years and
have grown old chiseling wheels. The ancients died together with
what they could not pass on: so what my master is reading is but
the dregs and dross of the ancients."

The wheelwright's offensive is built, as one
can easily see, around a figure. The very first sentence he
utters in the explicatory process by which he will unfasten the
Duke from the ties of his poor brand of interpretation, that
relies on authority and uses all the wrong reading strategies,
shows to us that we will witness analogical reasoning at work and
nothing more: the wheelwright has no intention of discussing the
actual words of the Sages, or any words for that matter. He will
just expose analogically and attempt to drive the point home by
his figurative approach. Like any good minister, the wheelwright
will use the power of example; however, in contrast to the
traditional sovereign-minister dialogical situations, we are told
explicitly that Bian will use a figure, an analogy, which he
places from the very beginning in the contemplative horizon
guan of his "thing," shi. As this is the
word used par excellence for the official affairs of the state,
this subtle transposition further strengthens the figure we are
now ready to discover.

The analogy, acknowledged as such, is not as vivid
as the fast-paced description at the beginning of Butcher
Ding's story, but is still built in a rhythmical fashion and
with some short rhyme patterns. Chiseling the wheel, carving it
out so that the proper dialectics between curved and straight,
full and void, axle and wheel or hub and spokes be properly
realized is an orderly act, just like carving the ox. However,
this time we have something to do with doing and not with
undoing: or maybe, as we may have already guessed, there is no
true difference between the two?

That is the way things seem to be, and that is how
they should be in light of many other arguments one may bring to
defend this point: undoing and doing, de-textualizing and
textualizing, "interpreting" and "creating"
are operations that abide by the same principles and have the
same purpose, which is proper adjustment, correlation, fitting.
Using one and the same material, which is language, both doer and
undoer stick to a poetics of casting and paring in their
encounters with the world of words. Under these circumstances,
the anxieties that will haunt equally all medieval poetics, in
spite of their differences, will be directed fundamentally
towards solving one single problem, i.e. how to find the words
that are able to render, and, most of all, be the
"knack" that Wheelwright Bian is unable to
verbalize.

There is something else at the end of this story,
something that might explain why the wheelwright was more often
invoked in later medieval texts than the butcher or other
"knack story" figures: unlike the butcher's case,
where Zhuangzi himself had to undo the figure for us in order to
have us go beyond it, here it is the wheelwright who both
constructs the figure (the analogy) and then deconstructs it,
exposing it qua figure. Therefore, as I have already said, we do
not get to see Duke Huan draw any lesson at the end of the story
or do any analogical effort by himself, as Prince Wen Hui did:
Bian did and undid everything, both for him and for us.
Accordingly, even though the wheelwright's story seems to
have been less efficient in the short run, it has certainly
proved more effective in the long run: the wheelwright's
awareness of the lack of adequacy of language will echo in many a
work and, moreover, his own name will become emblematic for his
story, a figure for a figure, as in Lu Ji's Rhapsody on
Literature.

Let us remember where it is that we started. Let us
remember that what we have been in search of was just a manner of
interpreting this textual ox or this swift, slow, rhythmical and
musical wheel that is the Zhuangzi. I do not know if this has
been the right manner to find such a manner and I do not know
whether or not I have disfigured figures in my attempt to say
something. I do know, however, that any -ism that is too easily
applied to the text seems to me quite suspect, because I suspect
it of offering a reading that is self-centered and linear.

The alternate reading I have been trying to suggest
here starts from a different spatialization: I have tried to show
that a reading that winds and meanders and volutes, floating and
sinking along with the text,[23] may prove more rewarding than one that
purports to draw strong directions and lines. More plainly, I am
pleading for a circular, repetitive, allegorical and essentially
insecure reading, a fundamentally fragmentary reading. A new
figure for reading implies new difficulties for reading: it seems
to me, however, that this is a better way to let the
Zhuangzi keep its integrity quan without seeing it as
a whole quan. Or maybe it is simply a way to let it be
what it is, a net of words that confirm, contradict, develop,
contract, reduce, enlarge, continue, and discontinue each other,
a net that enmeshes us in its polyphonic orchestration the more
we try to cast it away.

R E F E R E N C E S

AMES, ROGER T. 1998.
Wandering at Ease in the Zhuangzi. Albany, New York:
State University of New York Press.

[1]For the
etymology of jie, see Shuowen under jiao and
Karlgren, 1923, 129 and 1957, 228-9 (861a). For a longer
discussion of the senses of the word and some of its modern
compounds, see Callahan (in Ames, 1998, 191). For a speculation
on the meaning of jie and its role in Chinese poetics, see
Liu (1988, 98, 94).

[2]Translations of this particular story are myriad,
and many of them are not only highly accurate, but also very
beautiful. While drawing heavily on Watson's (1968, 50-1),
Graham's (1981, 63), Mair's (1994, 26-7), Kjellberg's
(in Kjellberg and Ivanhoe, 1996, 11-12) and Cook's (1997), I
have decided to renew here my previous translation (Luca, 1993,
207-8). My basis has been once more Guo Qingfan's edition
(1961, 119-24). I have profited well from Guo Xiliang et
al.'s glosses (1981, 603-6).

[3]The voices
borrowed by tradition for these associations are Sima Biao's,
in the first case, and Xiang Xiu's in the second. Cf. Guo
Qingfan, 1961, 118. The translation of jingshou by
"Managing Chief" is Mair's.

[4]For a
discussion on translating this last sentence, see Cook, 1997,
note 58. For a different reading of guanzhi and
shenyu ("the reflective awareness of senses" and
"spirit-like encounter", respectively), see Eno (in
Kjellberg and Ivanhoe, 1996, 135).

[5]Translation mine (Guo Qingfan, 1961, 404). The order
between dao and de in the first sequence has been
modified. Reference to this passage has been suggested by Li
Zehou and Liu Gangji (1984, 275).

[6]Apart from
the occurrences alluded to here (in chapters 3, 4, 6, 11, 12, and
23), jie has a nice career in the Zhuangzi, where
it is often used figuratively in association with the heart. Let
me mention also the interesting use of the term in chapter
11's context of jie xin shi shen (Guo Qingfan, 1961,
390), which highlights a subtle difference of perception between
heart and spirit; the chapter 32 possibly ironical use in nei
cheng bu jie (Guo Qingfan, 1961, 1037); and most of all, the
particularly relevant use in chapter 33, where Zhuangzi himself
is said to ying yu hua er jie yu wu (Guo Qingfan, 1961,
1099).

[10]In
another well-known "knack story", Carpenter Qing puts
forth the formula yi tian he tian, "matching the
heavenly by the heavenly" (Guo Qingfan, 1961, 658),
recommending, thus, almost as an echo to Butcher Ding, a state of
fusion that transcends all self-other and subjective-objective
oppositions. This fusion is often associated with the
wuhua process defined at the end of the butterfly dream
(Zhang Shaokang and Liu Sanfu, 1995, 69; Wang Yunxi 1990, 208-9).
Zhang Shaokang (in Wu Wenzhi, 1987, 11) puts it even more
strongly: ren wuhua le, wu renhua le.

[11]Cheng
Xuanying (Guo Qingfan, 1961, 123) says plainly that "the
blade of the knife is sharp, is thin and not thick." Wang Li
(1962, 386) comments that the phrase "speaks extremely about
its [the knife's] thinness", while the compilers of
Zhonghua huoye wenxuan (in Hogea, 1973, 22) say that "the
blade of the knife is so thin that it seems to have no
thickness."

[13]The
identity issue here is well known and has lead Waley and the
commentators he followed (Waley, 1939, 47-8) to read here the
actions of a different butcher.

[14]It
looks so, of course, in light of the many passages in the
Zhuangzi or other early texts that connect "nourishing
life" with a blocking of the senses, inner wandering,
spiritual journeys, etc. See, for instance, the lesson taught by
Guang Chengzi to Huangdi in chapter 11: wu shi wu ting, bao
shen yi jing ... (Guo Qingfan, 1961, 381).

[15]That
Butcher Ding's skill was understood as quasi-mystical is made
clear, for instance, by Sun Chuo in his Rhapsody on Roaming the
Celestial Terrace Mountains (Knechtges, 1996, 251). The point is
also made by Owen (1992, 610), who mentions the butcher's
"almost miraculous skills, achieved by a unique spiritual
mastery." On the other hand, Eno (in Kjellberg and Ivanhoe,
1996, 136) thinks Butcher Ding has not become "a perfect
virtuoso" yet.

[17]Zhang
Longxi (1992, 54-5) considers the wheelwright "an archetypal
image of the tongue-tied poet" and then mentions the
well-known references to Bian in Lu Ji's Rhapsody on
Literature and Liu Xie's Wen xin diao long, as
well as in the work of the Ming critic Xu Zhenqing. One allusion
in Cao Pi's Discourse on Literature and one or two
extra passages from both Lu and Liu's texts may be easily
added to the list.

[18]This
translation of Wheelwright Bian's story (Guo Qingfan, 1961,
490-2) is also based on my previous work (Luca, 1993, 250).

[19]For an
outline of the Duke's personality, see Schilling and Ptak,
1998.

[20]A
different interpretation is given here by Schwitzgebel (in
Kjellberg and Ivanhoe, 1996, 90), who believes that the issue of
the sages' death is a "red herring."

[21]Eugene
Eoyang (1993, 220) makes an interesting observation in this
sense, noting that "The attack against words found in the
Yijing and the Dao De Jing is against fixed
concepts, words transcribed and defined. The word that transmits
itself directly from the page through the eye to the mind,
without the intermediary of oral discourse and modulation, is the
word that must be suspected." The observation could be
easily extended to this and other passages in the
Zhuangzi.

[22]The
butcher's story, like many other passages in the text, is
also marked by a tension built around the relationship between
life and death. This becomes even more obvious once we choose to
add to the standard text the line, preserved in only one
manuscript, that would have the butcher not only cut up the
flesh, but also actually kill the animal. Cf. Kjellberg (in
Kjellberg and Ivanhoe, 1996, 12, 24). Projecting this tension
into a theory of Zhuangzi's amorality, as done by Eno (in
Kjellberg and Ivanhoe, 1996, 142), seems, however,
unwaranted.